In Memoriam: Judith Wilt

Highly respected by her English Department colleagues, Dr. Wilt also collaborated with faculty members across University academic areas, and served as a valued mentor to a multitude of Boston College students during her long tenure.

“Judith was a longtime colleague who was extraordinarily committed to the BC English Department and to Boston College,” said Min Hyoung Song, English Department chair and professor. “She believed strongly that the study of literature, very capaciously defined, is fundamentally important and matters to the lives of our students in ways they may not yet have come to appreciate. She dedicated herself to this belief, tirelessly attending department meetings, serving on committees, and then leading as chair of the department. Even when she retired, she continued to teach courses as a professor emeritus” for as long as her health permitted.

“When I first arrived in the department as an assistant professor, Judith was one of the faculty members in the department who made me feel welcome by engaging me in serious conversation and never missing a chance to talk about a book that she had read and thought I might be interested in,” Song added.  

Dr. Wilt worked full-time as a journalist at the Pittsburgh Catholic newspaper, while attending night classes as Duquesne University, from which she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1967. She went on to pursue a doctoral degree in English at Indiana University, in pursuit of her passion to enter the teaching profession.

She taught at Princeton University before coming to Boston College in 1978, where she was a founding member and director of the Women’s Studies Program in 1983. The year prior, an interdisciplinary minor in Women's Studies was instituted. In 2009, the program was renamed to Women’s and Gender Studies Program to reflect the evolving scope of study.  

Dr. Wilt served two terms as chair of the English Department, from 1990
to 1996, and became the inaugural Newton College Alumnae Chair in Western Culture in 2002—a position she held until 2012. 

During her long and prolific BC tenure, she taught and wrote on nineteenth century British fiction, women writers, religion and literature, and popular culture genres, with a newer interest in Neo-Victorian studies.

Dr. Wilt is the author of six books, including Women Writers and the Hero of Romance (2014), and Behind Her Times: Transition England in the Novels of Mary Arnold Ward (2005).

She discussed the topic of the former book in a 2014 interview with eScholarship@BC—an institutional repository managed by the University Libraries. The interview synopsis notes: she drew together “classics like Wuthering Heights and Middlemarch, epics from Ayn Rand and Dorothy Dunnett, and pop culture romances from The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Sheik to the Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey sagas, [and] depicts the feminine imagination conceiving the hero as 'the girl' in pursuit of a transcendent self, as the mother looking for a partner in community... and in fifty shades between these figures… And the reader finds pleasures both radical and conservative in the controversial domain of 'romance.'”

Dr. Wilt also wrote dozens of essays and reviews for prominent professional journals.

She taught at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Among her more recent undergraduate courses were Storytelling and Catholicism, War Stories, and Great Adaptations. 

After her retirement from the University in 2011, she continued to teach a course in the English Department, and remained an enthusiastic participant in participate Boston College activities. She was a member of the BC Association of Retired Faculty, for which she had held the position of secretary.

“While it's been several years since she retired, her spirit lives on,” Song added. “The BC English Department is changing fast, and Judith played a large role in setting it on its current course.”  

A resident of Chestnut Hill, Dr. Wilt is survived by her brother John Wilt and his wife, Mary Jo, of Houston, TX, as well as by many nieces and nephews. She was predeceased by her brothers Thomas, Robert, Peter, and William Wilt, and by her parents, Thomas and Katherine (Steffen) Wilt.

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